Project on Family Homelessness Recognized Nationally

Posted by Amanda Kelly on Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 10:24 AM PDT

March 23, 2011

The work of SU's Center for Strategic Communications Project on Family Homelessness is singled out as an example of "smart collaborations" in a new report, State of the News Media 2011, from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. The report looks at the results from one of the journalism fellowships that we awarded last year, to the Seattle Times:

Bob Payne, the newspaper’s director of communities, wrote in an e-mail, “Collaborations and grant-funded journalism efforts are really taking off. With newspapers working with less in terms of money and bodies, looking for other ways to get important stories covered is becoming vital. More and more papers are dedicating time to research aimed at smart collaborations and grant applications.”

The Times utilized a different form of partnership to produce a special report called, “Invisible Families, the Homeless You Don’t See.” The project was produced as part of a fellowship through Seattle University, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Times received one of the fellowship grants to use as it saw fit. Other fellows included journalists from three other media organizations and two freelance journalists.

Payne wrote, “In our case, the Invisible Families project from last August employed both of these angles to arrive at a compelling package for both print and online: grant money from Seattle University helped fund work on the project, and our partnerships with local news blogs helped bring diverse coverage to the project.”